People have lots of data now. Like, a real lot. I don’t know how many Libraries of Congress exactly, but it can be a lot. Previously, you’d have to buy a bunch of Briks to store this data. Rubrik have recognised that this can be a bit of a problem in terms of footprint. With NAS Direct Archive, you can send the data to an “archive” target of your choice. So now you can protect a big chunk of data that goes through the Rubrik environment to end target such as object storage, public cloud, or NFS. The idea is to reduce the amount of Rubrik devices you need to buy. Which seems a bit weird, but their customers will be pretty happy to spend their money elsewhere.

[image courtesy of Rubrik]

It’s simple to get going, requiring a tick of a box to be configured. The metadata remains protected with the Rubrik cluster, and the good news is that nothing changes from the end user recovery experience.

Elastic App Service (EAS)

Rubrik now provides the ability to ingest DBs across a wider spectrum, allowing you to protect more of the DB-based applications you want, not just SQL and Oracle workloads.

SAP HANA Protection

I’m not really into SAP HANA, but plenty of organisations are. Rubrik now offer a SAP Certified Solution which, if you’ve had the misfortune of trying to protect SAP workloads before, is kind of a neat feature.

[image courtesy of Rubrik]

SQL Server Enhancements

There have been some nice enhancements with SQL Server protection, including:

So what about Group Backups? The nice thing about these is that you can protect many databases on the same SQL Server. Rather than process each VSS Snapshot individually, Rubrik will group the databases that belong to the same SLA Domain and process the snapshots as a batch group. There are a few benefits to this approach:

It reduces SQL Server overhead, as well as decreases the amount of time a backup requires to be completed; and

In turn, allowing customers to take more frequent backups of their databases delivering a lower RPO to the business.

vSphere Enhancements

Rubrik have done vSphere things since forever, and this release includes a few nice enhancements, including:

Live Mount VMDKs from a Snapshot – providing the option to choose to mount specific VMDKs instead of an entire VM; and

After selecting the VMDKs, the user can select a specific compatible VM to attach the mounted VMDKs.

Multi-Factor Authentication

The Rubrik Andes 5.0 integration with RSA SecurID will include RSA Authentication Manager 8.2 SP1+ and RSA SecurID Cloud Authentication Service. Note that CDM will not be supporting the older RADIUS protocol. Enabling this is a two-step process:

Enable RSA and associate a new or existing local Rubrik user or a new or existing LDAP server with the RSA Authentication Manager or RSA Cloud Authentication Service.

You also get the ability to generate API tokens. Note that if you want to interact with the Rubrik CDM CLI (and have MFA enabled) you’ll need these.

Other Bits and Bobs

There are a few other enhancements included, including:

Windows Bare Metal Recovery;

SLA Policy Advanced Configuration;

Additional Reporting and Metrics; and

Snapshot Retention Enhancements.

Thoughts and Further Reading

Wahl introduced the 5.0 briefing by talking about digital transformation as being, at its core, an automation play. The availability of a bunch of SaaS services can lead to fragmentation in your environment, and legacy technology doesn’t deal with with makes transformation. Rubrik are positioning themselves as a modern company, well-placed to help you with the challenges of protecting what can quickly become a complex and hard to contain infrastructure. It’s easy to sit back and tell people how transformation can change their business for the better, but these kinds of conversations often eschew the high levels of technical debt in the enterprise that the business is doing its best to ignore. I don’t really think that transformation is as simple as some vendors would have us believe, but I do support the idea that Rubrik are working hard to make complex concepts and tasks as simple as possible. They’ve dropped a shedload of features and enhancements in this release, and have managed to do so in a way that you won’t need to install a bunch of new applications to support these features, and you won’t need to do a lot to get up and running either. For me, this is the key advantage that the “next generation” data protection companies have over their more mature competitors. If you haven’t been around for decades, you very likely don’t offer support for every platform and application under the sun. You also likely don’t have customers that have been with you for 20 years that you need to support regardless of the official support status of their applications. This gives the likes of Rubrik the flexibility to deliver features as and when customers require them, while still focussing on keeping the user experience simple.

I particularly like the NAS Direct Archive feature, as it shows that Rubrik aren’t simply in this to push a bunch of tin onto their customers. A big part of transformation is about doing things smarter, not just faster. the folks at Rubrik understand that there are other solutions out there that can deliver large capacity solutions for protecting big chunks of data (i.e. NAS workloads), so they’ve focussed on leveraging other capabilities, rather than trying to force their customers to fill their data centres with Rubrik gear. This is the kind of thinking that potential customers should find comforting. I think it’s also the kind of approach that a few other vendors would do well to adopt.

*Update*

Here’re some links to other articles on Andes from other folks I read that you may find useful:

I’ve coveredCloudtenna in the past and had the good fortune to chat with Aaron Ganek about the general availability of Cloudtenna’s universal search product – DirectSearch. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts here.

About Cloudtenna

Cloudtenna are focussed on delivering “[t]urn-key search infrastructure designed specifically for files”. If you think of Elasticsearch as being synonymous with log search, then you might also like to think of Cloudtenna delivering an equivalent capability with file search.

The Challenge

According to Cloudtenna, the problem is that “[e]nterprises can’t keep track of files that are pattered across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS apps” and traditional search is a one-size-fits-all solution. In Cloudtenna’s opinion though, file search requires personalised search that reflects things such as ACLs. It’s expensive and difficult to scale.

Cloudtenna’s Solution

So what do Cloudtenna do then? The key features are the ability to:

Efficiently ingress massive amounts of data

Understand and adhere to user permissions

Return queries in near real-time

Reduce index storage and compute costs

“DirectSearch” is now generally available, and allows for cross-silo search across services such as DropBox, Gmail, Slack, Confluence, and so on. It seems reasonably priced at $10 US per user per month. Note that users who sign-up before December 1st 2018 can get 3 months of a free trial with no credit card details required).

DirectSearch CORE

In parallel to the release of DirectSearch, Cloudtenna are also announcing DirectSearch CORE – delivered via an OEM Model. I asked Ganek where he thought this kind of solution was a good fit. He told me that he saw it falling into three main categories:

Digital workspace category – eg. VMware, Citrix. Companies that want to be able to connect files into virtual digital workspaces;

Storage space – large storage vendors with SMB and NFS solutions – they might want to provide a global namespace over those transports; and

One of the big challenges with delivering a solution like DirectSearch is that every data source has its own permissions and ACL enforcement is a big challenge. Keep in mind that all of these different applications have their own version of authentication mechanisms, with some using open directory standards, and others doing proprietary stuff. And once you have authentication sorted out, you still need to ensure that users only get access to what they’re allowed to see. Cloudtenna tackle this challenge by ingesting “native ACLs” and normalising those ACLs with metadata.

Thoughts

Search is hard to do well. You want it to be quick, accurate, and easy to use. You also generally want it to be able to find stuff in all kinds of places. One of the problems with modern infrastructure is that we have access to a whole bunch of content repositories as part of our everyday corporate endeavours. I work with Slack, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, SharePoint, file servers, Microsoft Teams, iMessage, email, and all kinds of systems as part of my job. I’m the first to admit that I don’t always have a good handle on where some stuff is. And sometimes I use the wrong system because it’s more convenient to access than the correct one is. Now multiply this problem out by the thousands of users in a decent-sized enterprise and you’ve got a recipe for disaster in terms of finding corporate knowledge in a timely fashion. Combine that with billions of files and you’re a passenger on Terry Tate’s pain train. Cloudtenna has quite a job on its hands in terms of delivering on the promise of “[b]ringing order to file chaos”, but if they can do that, it’ll be pretty cool. I’ll be signing up for a trial in the very near future and, if chaotic files aren’t your bag, then maybe you should give it a spin too.

I recently had the opportunity to get on a call with Alan Conboy to talk about what’s been happening with Scale Computing lately. It was an interesting chat, as always, and I thought I’d share some of the news here.

Detroit Rock City

It’s odd how sometimes I forget that pretty much every type of business in existence uses some form of IT. Arts and performance organisations, such as the Detroit Symphony Orchestra are no exception. They are also now very happy Scale customers. There’s a YouTube video detailing their experiences that you can check out here.

Lenovo Partnership

Scale and Lenovorecently announced a strategic partnership, focussed primarily on edge workloads, with particular emphasis on retail and industrial environments. You can download a solution brief here. This doesn’t mean that Lenovo are giving up on some of their other HCI partnerships, but it does give them a competent partner to attack the edge infrastructure market.

GCG, Yeah You Know Me

Grupo Colón Gerena is a Puerto Rico-based “restaurant management company that owns franchises of brands including Wendy’s, Applebee’s, Famous Davés, Sizzler’s, Longhorn Steakhouse, Olive Garden and Red Lobster throughout the island”. You may recall Puerto Rico suffered through some pretty devastating weather in 2017 thanks to Hurricane Maria. GCG have been running the bulk of their workload in Google Cloud since just before the event, and are still deciding whether they really want to move it back to an on-premises solution. There’s definitely a good story with Scale delivering workloads from the edge to the core and through to Google Cloud. You can read the full case study here.

Thoughts

It’s no big secret that I’m a fan of Scale Computing. And not just because I have an old HC1000 in my office that I fire up every now and then (Collier I’m still waiting on those SSDs you promised me a few years ago). They are relentlessly focussed on delivering easy to use solutions that work well and deliver great resiliency and performance, particularly in smaller environments. Their DRaaS play, and partnership with Google, has opened up some doors to customers that may not have considered Scale previously. The Lenovo partnership, and success with customers like GCG and DSO, is proof that Scale are doing a lot of good stuff in the HCI space.

Anyone who’s had the good fortune to deal with Scale, from their executives and founders through to their support staff, will tell you that they’re super easy to deal with and pretty good at what they do. It’s great to see them enjoying some success. It strikes me that they go about their business without a lot of the chest beating and carry on associated with some other vendors in the industry. This is a good thing, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next for them.

The November 2018 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting (and last one of the year) will be held on Tuesday 20th November at Toobirds at 127 Creek Street from 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm. It’s sponsored by Cisco and promises to be a great afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

VMUG Intro

VMware Presentation:Workspace ONE UEM Modern Management for Windows 10

Cisco Presentation:Cloud First in a Multi-cloud world

Q&A

Refreshments and drinks.

Cisco have gone to great lengths to make sure this will be a fun and informative session and I’m really looking forward to hearing what they’ve been up to. You can find out more information and register for the event here. I hope to see you there. Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring one of these events, please get in touch with me and I can help make it happen.

Maxta recently announced MxIQ. I had the opportunity to speak to Barry Phillips (Chief Marketing Officer) and Kiran Sreenivasamurthy (VP, Product Management) and thought I’d share some information from the announcement here. It’s been a while since I’ve covered Maxta, and you can read my previous thoughts on them here.

Introducing MxIQ

MxIQ is Maxta’s support and analytics solution and it focuses on four key aspects:

Proactive support through data analytics;

Preemptive recommendation engine;

Forecast capacity and performance trends; and

Resource planning assistance.

Historical data trends for capacity and performance are available, as well as metadata concerning cluster configuration, licensing information, VM inventory and logs.

Architecture

MxIQ is a server – client solution and the server component is currently hosted by Maxta in AWS. This can be decoupled from AWS and hosted in a private DC environment if customers don’t want their data sitting in AWS. The downside of this is that Maxta won’t have visibility into the environment, and you’ll lose a lot of the advantages of aggregated support data and analytics.

[image courtesy of Maxta]

There is a client component that runs on every node in the cluster in the customer site. Note that one agent in each cluster is active, with the other agents communicate with the active agent. From a security perspective, you only need to configure an outbound connection, as the server responds to client requests, but doesn’t initiate communications with the client. This may change in the future as Maxta adds increased functionality to the solution.

From a heartbeat perspective, the agent talks to the server every minute or so. If, for some reason, it doesn’t check in, a support ticket is automatically opened.

[image courtesy of Maxta]

Privileges

There are three privilege levels that are available with the MxIQ solution.

Customer

Partner

Admin

Note that the Admin (Maxta support) needs to be approved by the customer.

[image courtesy of Maxta]

The dashboard provides an easy to consume overview of what’s going on with managed Maxta clusters, and you can tell at a glance if there are any problems or areas of concern.

[image courtesy of Maxta]

Thoughts

I asked the Maxta team if they thought this kind of solution would result in more work for support staff as there’s potentially more information coming in and more support calls being generated. Their opinion was that, as more and more activities were automated, the workload would decrease. Additionally, logs are collected every four hours. This saves Maxta support staff time chasing environmental information after the first call is logged. I also asked whether the issue resolution was automated. Maxta said it wasn’t right now, as it’s still early days for the product, but that’s the direction it’s heading in.

The type of solution that Maxta are delivering here is nothing new in the marketplace, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable for Maxta and their customers. I’m a big fan of adding automated support and monitoring to infrastructure environments. It makes it easier for the vendor to gather information about how their product is being used, and it provides the ability for them to be proactive, and super responsive, to customer issues as the arise.

From what I can gather from my conversation with the Maxta team, it seems like there’s a lot of additional functionality they’ll be looking to add to the product as it matures. The real value of the solution will increase over time as customers contribute more and more telemetry data and support to the environment. This will obviously improve Maxta’s ability to respond quickly to support issues, and, potentially, give them enough information to avoid some of the more common problems in the first place. Finally, the capacity planning feature will no doubt prove invaluable as customers continue to struggle with growth in their infrastructure environments. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this product evolves over time.

MeshInspect – with performance analytics for pinpointing anomalies quickly and at scale.

Performance

Excelero have said that NVMesh delivers “shared NVMe at local performance and 90+% storage efficiency that helps further drive down the cost per GB”.

Protection

There’s also a range of protection options available now. Excelero tell me that you can start at level 0 (no protection, lowest latency) all the way to “MeshProtect 10+2 (distributed dual parity)”. This allows customers to “choose their preferred level of performance and protection. [While] Distributing data redundancy services eliminates the storage controller bottleneck.”

Visibility

One of my favourite things about NVMesh 2 is the MeshInspect feature, with a “built-in statistical collection and display, stored in a scalable NoSQL database”.

[image courtesy of Excelero]

Thoughts And Further Reading

Excelero emerged form stealth mode at Storage Field Day 12. I was impressed with their offering back then, and they continue to add features while focussing on delivering top notch performance via a software-only solution. It feels like there’s a lot of attention on NVMe-based storage solutions, and with good reason. These things can go really, really fast. There are a bunch of startups with an NVMe story, and the bigger players are all delivering variations on these solutions as well.

Excelero seem well placed to capitalise on this market interest, and their decision to focus on a software-only play seems wise, particularly given that some of the standards, such as NVMe over TCP, haven’t been fully ratified yet. This approach will also appeal to the aspirational hyperscalers, because they can build their own storage solution, source their own devices, and still benefit from a fast software stack that can deliver performance in spades. Excelero also supports a wide range of transports now, with the addition of NVMe over FC and TCP support.

NVMesh 2 looks to be smoothing some of the rougher edges that were present with version 1, and I’m pumped to see the focus on enhanced visibility via MeshInspect. In my opinion these kinds of tools are critical to the uptake of solutions such as NVMesh in both the enterprise and cloud markets. The broadening of the connectivity story, as well as the enhanced resiliency options, make this something worth investigating. If you’d like to read more, you can access a white paper here (registration required).

Something went pear-shaped with my mail provider, so I decided to use Gmail for my NAS email notifications. QNAP has some built-in smarts and works out of the box. For my OpenMediaVault environment, though, notifications with Gmail take a little extra effort. In short, you’ll need to turn on 2FA and create an app password.

Vembu are a site sponsor of PenguinPunk.net. They’ve asked me to look at their product and write about it. I’m in the early stages of evaluating the BDR Suite in the lab, but thought I’d pass on some information about their upcoming 4.0 release. As always, if you’re interested in these kind of solutions, I’d encourage you to do your own evaluation and get in touch with the vendor, as everyone’s situation and requirements are different. I can say from experience that the Vembu sales and support staff are very helpful and responsive, and should be able to help you with any queries. I recently did a brief article on getting started with BDR Suite 3.9.1 that you can download from here.

New Features

So what’s coming in 4.0?

Hyper-V Cluster Backup

Vembu will support backing up VMs in a Hyper-V cluster and, even if VMs configured for backup are moved from one host to another, the incremental backup will continue to happen without any interruption.

Shared VHDx Backup

Vembu now supports backup of the shared VHDx of Hyper-V.

CheckSum-based Incrementals

Vembu uses CBT for incremental backups. And for some CBT failure cases they will be using CheckSum for the incremental to happen without any interruption.

Credential Manager

No need to enter credentials every time, Vembu Credential Manager now allows you to manage the credentials of the host and the VMs running in it. This will be particularly handy if you’re doing a lot of application-aware backup job configuration.

Thoughts

I had a chance to speak with Vembu about the product’s functionality. There’s a lot to like in terms of breadth of features. I’m interested in seeing how 4.0 goes when it’s released and hope to do a few more articles on the product then. If you’re looking to evaluate the product, this evaluator’s guide is as good place as any to start. As an aside, Vembu are also offering 10% off their suite this Halloween (until November 2nd) – see here for more details.

For a fuller view of what’s coming in 4.0, you can read Vladan‘s coverage here.

I recently had the opportunity to deploy a Vembu BDR 3.9.1 Update 1 appliance and thought I’d run through the basics of getting started. There’s a new document outlining the process on the articles page.

I’ve been doing some work with Cohesity in our lab and thought it worth covering some of the basic features that I think are pretty neat. In this edition of Cohesity Basics, I thought I’d quickly cover off how to exclude VMs from protection jobs based on assigned tags. In this example I’m using version 6.0.1b_release-20181014_14074e50 (a “feature release”).

Process

The first step is to find the VM in vCenter that you want to exclude from a protection job. Right-click on the VM and select Tags & Custom Attributes. Click on Assign Tag.

In the Assign Tag window, click on the New Tag icon.

Assign a name to the new tag, and add a description if that’s what you’re into.

In this example, I’ve created a tag called “COH-Test”, and put it in the “Backup” category.

Now go to the protection job you’d like to edit.

Click on the Tag icon on the right-hand side. You can then select the tag you created in vCenter. Note that you may need to refresh your vCenter source for this new tag to be reflected.

When you select the tag, you can choose to Auto Protect or Exclude the VM based on the applied tags.

If you drill in to the objects in the protection job, you can see that the VM I wanted to exclude from this job has been excluded based on the assigned tag.

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disclaimer

The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of my employers, previous or current. This is my blog.

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